On 2 December 2010 the president of Fifa, Sepp Blatter, stood on a stage in Zurich and announced that the 2018 and 2022 World Cup finals would be held in Russia and Qatar.

“I am a happy president,” he said. The then-president of Qatar, Sheikh Mohammed bin Hamed Al-Thani, followed Blatter onto the stage. “You will be proud of us,” he promised.

Three years on, it is hard to read those words without wincing. Fifa’s executive committee is today holding a meeting at which it may consider the possibility of moving the 2022 World Cup from summer to winter — a totally unprecedented move that will throw football into scheduling chaos for several years, and which is all down to the impressive stupidity of Fifa itself.

Qatar is obviously an insane place to hold a summer football tournament. Daytime temperatures in July regularly rise above 40C, sometimes to around 50C. This is not the place to play or to watch football. You might as well hold the World Cup on Mars.

This was always obvious. A 2009 Fifa assessment of Qatar’s bid stated that “the fact that the competition is planned in June/July… has to be considered as a potential health risk for players, officials, the Fifa family (read: corporate liggers) and spectators”.

Qatar’s bid suggested that they would develop air-conditioned stadia. But the Fifa assessors weren’t sure. They ranked Qatar as a “high-risk” bidder and everyone expected either Australia or the US (the other nations to tender were Japan and South Korea) to win.

But then — by fair means or otherwise — Qatar won the secret vote of the Fifa executive committee, and with it the World Cup. The post-facto argument was that football was going to bring its roadshow to the Middle East but there have been allegations of corruption in the bidding process. Now work on Qatar’s stadia and infrastructure is well underway. But so too is the campaign to move the 2022 World Cup.

There are two strands to the criticisms of Qatar. The first concerns their scorching building sites, where migrant builders are dying as they toil. At least 70 Nepalese workers have died since the start of 2012 and unions project thousands more deaths. It is alleged that workers are basically enslaved, their travel documents and pay withheld to keep them labouring.

Callous as it may sound, this is not a problem peculiar to football. Anyone spending time in the Gulf sees the massive discrepancy in pay and conditions between citizens and wealthy tourists, and the imported workers who build and staff the vast glass-and-concrete hotels, shopping malls and office complexes. This is a very bad thing but nothing Fifa does or says — even if it were so inclined — will change it.

The bigger problem, from Fifa’s perspective, is the mutiny within football that is growing over holding the World Cup there at all. Almost everyone, including Blatter, has now agreed that it is impossible to hold the tournament in the summer. But what are the options?

The first is to play the tournament somewhere else (Australia seems most likely) — but this promises a storm of legal action and bad publicity, as well as upsetting a state that is pumping money into football at influential levels.

The second option is to play the tournament in the winter. Now, winter in Qatar is balmy, pleasant, ideal for football. Unfortunately, to play a World Cup any time between November and February wreaks havoc with everything from club football in Europe to TV scheduling in America.

A winter World Cup would necessitate altering the European club season in a way that would upset scores of national leagues and their TV partners, as well as clubs who could lose their best players to a rigorous tournament at a critical time of year.

It would create potential clashes with the 2022 Winter Olympics and the American football Super Bowl — both of which would anger broadcasters who have already paid Fifa hundreds of millions to show the tournament.

And a winter World Cup would also be wildly unfair on the failed 2022 bidders, who lost the vote only to find that the terms have been changed. Australia has already said it will seek compensation.This is probably, however, the least-worst option. All that is left is to make the decision at the least-damaging time for Fifa, and for Blatter’s hopes of being re-elected president for a fifth term in 2015.

So who do we blame? Not Qatar. The way it treats workers is ghastly but it cannot be blamed for the policy that lies behind its World Cup programme. The tiny gas-and-oil-rich emirate is committed to an aggressive programme of national expansion to insure against the day their natural resources run out.

Thus the state-run Qatar Investment Authority has bought trophy assets such as Harrods, The Shard and a worldwide portfolio of high-end property. Doha-based media organisation Al Jazeera seeks to be the loudest voice in the region, both in Arabic and English. Sport, with its huge global reach, is a part of that strategy. After all, Dubai hosts major tennis and golf tournaments, Abu Dhabi owns Manchester City and Bahrain hosts a Formula 1 grand prix.

Qatar has chosen football. The QIA already has extraordinarily close ties with Europe’s most prestigious team, Barcelona; they own a club of their own, Paris St-Germain; and they have employed famous footballing ambassadors such as Zinédine Zidane and Pep Guardiola. Hosting a World Cup is a logical extension of that policy.

The villains are Fifa: an organisation that could be said to occupy a space somewhere between corrupt and incompetent, which operates with little transparency, accountability or good sense, and which saw fit to vote for Qatar 2022 in the first place. It is they who have caused massive damage and turmoil in the sport they are charged with leading and protecting. Sepp Blatter may have been a “happy president” in 2010, but he deserves to be neither happy nor a president for very much longer.